Wonder Woman of the Week: Svetlana Alexievich

The Wonder Woman this week is a woman who became a heroine for a nation divided and disillusioned. During the late 1980's and early 1990's the Soviet Union was in collapse following years of education [read brainwashing] its citizens it would last forever as a utopia of Communism. During those turbulent times, one women scoured the former Soviet landscape recording the stories of a people whose national identity no longer existed.

Following nearly half a decade of non-violent war, the Soviet Union fell into collapse and rapidly descended into chaos. Several territories declared independence and their citizens fell into a collective confusion over national identity. Alexievich was one of these people. Born in modern-day Ukraine to Belarusian heritage, Alexievich responded to her own identity confusion by scouring the chaotic Soviet landscape recording the biographies of other confused former Soviets and in the process wound up with the most complete image of the history of the Soviet Union.

Alexievich went on to publish several anthropological works on the history of the Soviet Union and in doing so earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. For her six ethnographic histories, Alexievich earned several honors and awards including several from the collapsing Soviet Union. Alexievich herself described her books as the collection of differing truths that form a collective history of suffereing that defined Soviet Nationalism.